Katydid CD ROM issues

[Tom Moritz]

Just for the benefit of those not aware of this line of development...
(I have no direct involvement with Stanford/Highwire)
Tom Moritz

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FROM: HighWire Press: A Brief Introduction  (http://highwire.stanford.edu)
[Snip]
HighWire was founded to ensure that its partners -
    scientific societies and responsible publishers - would
    remain strong and able to lead the transition toward use
    of new technologies for scientific communication.
    Concerned that scientific societies separately would
    lack the resources and expertise to lead a major
    technical infrastructure shift in publications, Stanford
    University, in founding HighWire, accepted the role of
    partner, agent of change, and advisor. Begun as a close
    collaboration of scientists, librarians and publishers, it
    has not strayed from that model in its nearly four years
    of rapid growth.

    Under the guidance of its publishing partners,
    HighWire's approach to online publishing of scholarly
    journals is not simply to mount electronic images of
    printed pages; rather, by adding links among authors,
    articles and citations, advanced searching capabilities,
    high-resolution images and multimedia, and
    interactivity, the electronic versions provide added
    dimensions to the information provided in the printed
    journals.

    Working within the individual (and very different)
    subscription policies of the societies and publishers,
    HighWire manages subscriber access to the journals it
    puts online. This ranges from individual subscriptions
    to institutional access, and can even scale up to
    consortial or national access policies. Much content is,
    of course, available to all users on the Web without
    subscription.

    With profound and growing ties to the societies and
    publishers it serves, and equally profound links to
    scholars and the research library community, HighWire
    emphasizes another species of communication as well.
    Through semi-annual meetings of the journal publishers
    and innumerable operational discussions, there is a very
    lively, productive, and path-breaking dialogue among
    the many participants in the HighWire success to date.

    Further information can be found online at:
    http://highwire.stanford.edu, or, for readers outside the
    U.S. at: http://intl.highwire.org

    [Our original mission statement, startup strategy, and
    prospectus from June 1995]





At 09:35 AM 7/16/99 -0700, Doug Yanega wrote:
>Jim Beach wrote:
>
>>The potential payoffs
>>for systematics research and for society are orders of magnitude greater
>>for distributed database systems which interoperate (even through
>>relatively simple, standard query interfaces) than they are for stand-alone
>>information resources.  That is very clear if one looks at what is
>>happening with database systems in the molecular and structural biology
>>communities and also with what the secondary publishing industry (BIOSIS,
>>ISI, High Wire, Elsevier, and other science publishers, abstracters and
>>indexers) is doing to integrate different *kinds* of publication data from
>>different sources into a common product.  The unstoppable trend is data
>>integration across levels of biological organization, publication, and
>>human activity (research and environmental management, teaching, etc.).
>
>I hesitate to glumly point out that this trend is entirely stoppable, and
>in fact seems likely to be stopped, and probably all too soon. One look at
>the ongoing legislative tussles over "intellectual property rights",
>especially regarding databases, makes it clear that we might have most free
>public access to such on-line resources closed for legal reasons, if things
>continue along their present course. We in the systematic community are at
>the periphery, and no one formulating these laws gives us any thought, but
>the laws will affect us all the same. It would not be the first time the
>taxonomic community was caught in the backwash of laws written to deal with
>other matters, but defined broadly enough to include us.
>
>>It's going to be a very exciting future for systematics and for collections
>>based research if we can build the standards infrastructure and devote more
>>of our precious technologists to the task of bringing species and specimen
>>data, information and knowledge in interoperating systems on the Internet.
>
>If other museums follow the trend of the NHM and declares every specimen's
>data and image proprietary, it is going to quash such hopes rather
>effectively, don't you think? If the world's major museums refuse to share
>their data freely, this technology will have little to work with. I share
>your vision - you *know* that I do - but I also see bad, bad things on the
>horizon that could derail everything.
>
>Rather than writing and posting a separate reply, I'll tack on Hugh
>Wilson's comment here:
>
>>  If professional
>>societies or working scientific groups can provide useful information
>>on the web for open public access, it will be *used*, and home sites
>>providing access to the data will be visited by many.  Given the
>>nature of web economics right now, this usage could (should) be used
>>by professional societies as leverage to harvest community returns
>>for community investment.  If professional societies were active in
>>this area, the potential for returns to those providing the
>>information, or at least the discipline, are high.  This is not the
>>case for web info nodes controlled by institutions, agencies, or
>>individuals that do not have direct contact with data contributors.
>>
>>So, I agree with Mary that "there is a potential here" that
>>professional societies should *make* time to explore.
>
>Web economics is such that most websites generate income by selling
>advertising space. Who exactly will pay to sponsor a web page on, say, a
>checklist and key for the water striders of the world? How much will they
>pay? Will they pay in *advance*, to get the research done? How does one
>deal with conflicts of interest? If there's exploration to be done,
>questions like that are the first ones to ask. Traditionally, taxonomists
>are terrible salesmen, as we've bemoaned here before, and the lack of
>ad-funded taxonomic websites is yet another reflection of this (though,
>admittedly, a lot can be attributed to that "conflict of interest" category
>above).
>
>Peace,
>
>
>Doug Yanega       Dept. of Entomology           Entomology Research Museum
>Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521
>phone: (909) 787-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
>                http://insects.ucr.edu/staff/yanega.html
>  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
>        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82

Tom Moritz                                             212-769-5417
Director of the Library                             212-769-5009 - FAX
American Museum of Natural History           tmoritz at amnh.org
79th St. @ Central Park West               http://nimidi.amnh.org/library.html
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USA